 Hello. Good afternoon. I'm going to present Daniel from Buenos Aires. He's going to talk about how they're using Drupal in Argentina. And it's related to three skinnotes that talks about how to use Drupal in the government. So I really look forward to seeing this use case from Latin America. Thanks very much. Okay, hi all. Thank you for coming. I'm really happy being here. I'm Daniel Abadi. I'm Buenos Aires City Electronic Government Director. First of all, tonight, this is, I love to say, this is a special message from the White House. The White House here is organizing a hackathon to try to help in Oklahoma. So all coders available should go to the Code and Launch at double three today, 7.30 p.m. and try to hop and see what's coming out there. There's also a website called It's Bitly-Drupal for OK. So you can see all the program there. So I hope you see you all tonight there. Yes, everyone's coming. So Buenos Aires. We started this journey about two years ago when we took off the office of electronic government trying to change Buenos Aires City websites. It was really hard. We, you know, we were thinking how to try to get the administration really smart and stop talking about, you know, smart cities. It's not about buildings, it's about people. So you need to try to focus in the cities and try to abandon, you know, all government structures. Right now, what I want to talk with you guys is trying to think about why all government websites are dead, why you need to start thinking about that, use the driving experience, why you need to have architecture models in Drupal, which was our solution for that case, and talk to you about our migration experience in government and how our digital platform is set for the city. But first of all, you know, I'm from Buenos Aires, Argentina. We are really a faraway country. We are right there, down there. OK, yes, you can laugh. Anyway, so for the people that know Buenos Aires City is the capital of Argentina. We got about three million people living in our city and every day they commute about four million people. That's a lot of people. So what we are giving services, if you think about, it's 28 million people that use our schools, use our hospitals, and all our infrastructure. So that's mainly our information. When you see about our government, three years ago, our mayor took the decision to set up free offices. New media office, which is in charge of citizen engagement and community engagement inside government, trying to get, you know, community managers, tutorials and reunions and trying to standardize processes. Our open government office was in charge of collecting the data, setting standards for releasing the data and the relationship with NGOs and other development communities. And our electronic government office, we're in charge of websites, mobile apps, maps and digital strategy for the city. So we ended up, you know, looking for our first website. We got this. This is Buenos Aires City's first website, 1997. Yeah, Web App Machine. So, you know, at that time, this website wasn't so wrong. You know, we were extremely focused on the city and it was a 97-page. So, you know, we got famous people in our website that used to live in the city and some services. Somehow, in 2004, we changed to this, which, you know, the thing is, for 2004, it was really good. It was developed inside government, but it was still 2002. And when we took the office in 2011, we found this website. Not only we found this website, but we found 400 websites, all focused on governance, structures and politician egos, which is really a problem, you know, because when you think your websites, thinking about your government structure, you're missing about people. You know, you're losing that great thing, you know, users need that is, for example, just in school for your kids, getting married, you know, getting an appointment for our office. And, you know, that's internet right now. That's where government should go, but government should, you know, people doesn't care who gave them the service inside government. They know, in our case, this service came from Buenos Aires city governments. They don't know, they don't need to know which area of the government do it. You know, it's really user-driven work experience. You know, that's what we were trying to change three years ago. And the mayor get it. And we proposed the mayor, you know, trying to focus on the citizen, and then we get in another talks, you know, because this is government that you need to talk with a lot of people to make things done. So, we talked with the secretary of media, the general secretary, the modernization minister. And after many, many, many talks, we showed them we really need to go to a user-driven experience where we can solve all these problems. So, we were having 400 websites. Why? Why we were sending all that dispersed traffic and attention of the people, making them confused. It's really hard to admin the content of 400 websites. Yes? How do we, you know, manage about 70 web teams inside the organization? Most of you, I don't know if you're part of government, but if you see an organization so complex like a government, you'll find you've got more than one development team inside the organization. They are having different strategies. So, it's really hard to get them pulled together to the same place. And then, of course, we want you to maintain our levels of services. One service city, main website, has about 23 million visits a year, which represents almost 180 million page views, which is really a lot. So, two years ago, we went to Drupalcon Chicago trying to find an answer for that. We got a lot, lot of questions. We were, you know, terrified. Like, you know, we were changing our websites and we haven't got a solution. We choose, you know, Humbla, WordPress. Even we thought about making ourselves a new framework, which was really done by that time. So, we went to Chicago and we found a great government community that, you know, it covered the thing that it helped us not to feel so alone, you know. I met Kristen over there, I'm seeing her, you know, with Drupalforgov and all that government, therapy sessions about, you know, that we are not alone and we are having the same problems. It doesn't care. It doesn't matter if you are Buenos Aires, if you are Sao Paulo, New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. It's government and sometimes, you know, bureaucracy is the same in many countries. So, we came back from Chicago having some things resolved and trying to set up a strategy of what we should do for Buenos Aires City. So, first of all, we set up some needs we need to cover and see if Drupal could match what we need. For example, we wanted a free click browsing in our websites. So, that's why we are trying to force our administration to create content just focusing on the citizen. We wanted to get all the organization inside one installation. That's why we choose organic groups using, you know, fields and core role management. Our 70 development teams, we integrated a centralized it inside our IT agency. We get our own modules and mainly we set up an architecture that let us work. Don't get me wrong. We tested all distributions being around. We tested open public. We downloaded everything. At the end, we decided that we should do it from scratch, you know. That's what's the main key at our solution. So, we came up with this. You know, this is the core for Buenos Aires City. We are using Varnish, Drupal 7 for our Buenos Aires City, main website which is www.bonosariscity.gov.ar. Our new tourism website which is running in the same single installation but has a different type of orientation. It's building multi-languages. It's being responsive. We are also using some add-ons like our own solar losing system which runs separately. We manage, you know, we are using Mancache and MySQL. We are building our own API. Our own login for the CitySend. Our G-Tunit, we are creating our own maps and we are using OpenX to administrate all the banners inside the city, inside the website that allow us to have a better perform and also track how those banners perform because something you are going to learn in government that everyone wants to be in the website. And not everyone gets clicks. It's simple math. So the way to show people if your campaign for say some way performs is to have information, to have data. So that's why we are setting OpenX which is a module for Drupal. So then we find, our architectures should, you know, support things like this. This is a visualization about our varnish log where you can see users hitting our website during two minutes. It's about 9,000 requests per second. And what you see is varnish moving, that is varnish moving trying to, you know, give back the information that you used to request. This is happening right now in our website and many of your installations. Sometimes, you know, we don't care or we don't take much of a deeper view on what is happening in our system. Drupal, as you know, requests a lot and demands a lot of services. Yes? Here you see, I don't know, Drupal, our solar system, our legacy website that we are still running, some applications, then you got some tries of hacking or attacking some places. It's really, it's really nice to see it. We can pull up. So, trying to get that work, we set up a core strategy for modules. We tried to get, you know, about then 80% of the cases are trying to be solved with these modules. You know, panels, views. We got our our own form module where we're not saving the forms, information inside Drupal database. We're sending it to Mongo database, which is easier and performs better. We got organic groups, social blog, workflow, which is really great, you know. That's why, you know, most will have panels and views are helping us to print and screen information really quick in a better way. And mostly, workflow and organic groups have been the solution to integrate different areas of the government with roles and publishing rights, you know, inside the content. Right now, the issue is not how your website performs or how your website looks. It's about how internal users adopt this system and they keep it, you know. That's why we set up workflow and organic groups, you know. Basically, that idea of organic groups, we took it watching OpenATRM that use organic groups from many of their content. And we tried to analyze how we took it out from OpenATRM and set it up in our website in different groups of government and different types of content. For example, necessary things in government is that if you get two different agencies running the same program, you don't need to have two different contents. That's why we use, you know, organic groups. So, until now, this was, I say, the easy part. Because, you know, it was all technical. We were close all in our office on how a website should run in Buenos Aires City after, you know, 10 years and they never changed it. And we step on this. Basically, we found that our legacy system was at 75,000 files hard-coded in HTML and no database. We used to have no content manager. And this was our main website. Then we have about 399 websites that were in the same situation. So, finally, we tried to take migration and it was like getting a card in a box. So, we screwed up. We failed. And we failed big. So, we took a decision, you know, to rewrite it all. So, to rewrite all, you need to get to administration and tell them you're not going to do a soft migration taking a database and just publishing everything as it was so that we're going to now take a new strategy. We're going to rewrite all the content focused on the citizens. So, if your content doesn't include the citizens inside your words, you're not part of our site. So, as you can imagine, we had a lot of complaints about that the first time. Thankfully, the mayor was on our side. So, we need to for that time, we took something for granted. You know, in immigration, you're going to lose links. You're going to lose traffic. The things that you deploy won't be there. Don't know why, but they won't be there. And you have to learn to live with that things because if you don't learn to live with those things, your site will never be online. That's the truth. It's really hard to set up immigration and trying to move it from one day to the other. Okay, we are going to be online in two weeks. Everything will be immigrating. You're not going to lose data. You're losing data. You're losing links. You're losing Google position. That's how it works and it's good that it's working that way because it's natural. You force administration to change content that doesn't help. It confuses the citizens. So, trying to get more friends in the administration than enemies, we set up a website extremely flexible. This is one of our city homepage right now. We set up a modular website with a great, great simplicity of, you know, a newsletter, some shortcuts and free positions down there that allow us to deploy widgets being banners, agenda, requests of services, and we try to standardize that. So, if you go to an agency, the agency has the same features and we try to reuse the code we developed. And we try to force our administration to get inside these modules, trying to learn how to get the content inside here, you know, because our main goal was not to get outside, was to decentralize the content management. That's the key. Before that, we were centralizing the content manager. So, once we get the areas, you know, get their content inside and try to manage their information, for us it was much more easier to release, you know, different areas. You know, you get some power. Once you get some users, it's really hard and right now we are having a Drupal website and our legacy website is still online and we are still migrating that information. So, then what we made was create a how-to guide. This is a guide that explains every procedure in the city. It is a really, really, really simple way that is inside this Drupal and allow us to integrate it with our news, with our different content of the areas and, mainly, we force the administration to set up one, two, three, four steps. So, you need to explain government procedures at least in four steps. It's really complicated for people. It's not. So, trying to get people more simple processes and content is, it's trying, it's the weapon we choose for our website. We were looking to symbolize our content, trying to get that government bureaucracy in text that is really hard for the users. I don't know you guys but I'm really frustrated when I do not understand a government procedure. It's a really horrible user experience and that's what's about internet right now. You need to give people a great user experience because you are the government and you can make his life better for five seconds in a website or you can do it at half for them in five seconds. So, we standardize our process and our type of content releasing procedures, news and different type of contents aligned to the city, right, needs. For that also, we adapt our Twitter boost trap and create our own distribution and to set this front-end development guide to the administration trying to give it to different areas for the legacy system, for the new system, for the new websites trying to get them inside our time our time, I'll say our point of view. So, we can set a standard inside our you know, so using Twitter boost trap you find everything responsive and everything is in the same styles we like and we are not doing horrible websites as we should. So, using Twitter boost trap this is our tourism side which is built into Twitter boost trap which is already responsive, it's built in a distribution with almost five languages and right now here it's also focused on the citizen. We try to take our old tourism side and translate it to Drupal in the same installation we have our main website. We're also working on a posting site which is built in Drupal. This basically is our economic development agency that's trying to get a posting site online. So, we took Drupal plus some modules we were using in with our our sites and we deployed here but you know, all this was putting a team together. So, right now this is how our team works in Buenos Aires office. We are about 40 people we started being four it was a great ride and a difficult one because you know, when we are four people trying to maintain a website here just Buenos Aires and when you try to convince the organization that you need to get a UX device designer when you need to get a mobile listener or PHP or Python it's cheaper than spending $15 million on a website people sometimes doesn't get it but thankfully you know the city get it. So, right now we are trying to get talented people for our teams to give back to the community and to integrate inside our organization the team looks like this is another visualization of this is our Git repository so this is about two years of work so everyone using Drupal and Git every time they commit or they pull or they share some code those make those explosions so that's about you know, September 2011 and you'll see it going till May of this year and what you see is how talented people inside administration can deliver great programs great sites and great products and not always you know, being outsourcing things. We have about a city budget two parts of the budget it goes to education hub and social aid so we need to do it in-house. There's no way we're going to spend a ton of money you know, letting America have different needs at the states so that's how our team works in using Git and Drupal but you know when you think about this you know that I'm changing it, sorry you know it's not about the apps I know I'm going fast but it's not about the apps it's not about the apps in government maybe you guys have faced it, it's about changing the culture. Governments have thought the same way for the last 70 years and their employees have done the same things I'm a government employee I know what I'm talking about and we try to bring young and talented people to bring new air to the administration you know, trying to break those rules and trying to help people inside government to capacitate, you know, get capacitation, get education about coding that's why last year we started a developing module for Drupal, trying to get government employees to learn how to develop a module inside our websites which is really, really simple and of course our contractors sometimes you know, a government area an agency they call me okay now we get a contractor, we already bought a website, we're trying not to buy websites, we're trying to work with contractors and ask them modules, ask them to contribute to our distro not to buy a new entire website in the end when you think it you need to maintain those websites and sometimes contractors are not forever so what we tried to do in our organization was setting up a GovCam, trying to integrate government employees which you know is a resume of our GovCam so what you can see here is, you know, this is one day 500 employees talking about anything they do in government related with technology maps urban development whatever you want trying to see engage, it's really necessary for governments to engage between their employees and between their citizens, it's really hard to have websites that never never change the content, why why we are working with websites that you cannot change content every day we should be, you know, thinking this and getting an approach to the citizen with new tools Trouble gave us that opportunity to set a bar inside government strategy for websites and right now, you know, setting up GovCam makes us possible to explain what we are doing in government so as I said before it's not about the apps, it's about getting people engaged, getting a change of culture inside government getting closer to people government officials should be closer to people somehow my role is using the internet to be closer to people and that's what it's all about, it's not about it's not about Drupal or setting up a huge infrastructure in technology, it's not about internet gurus, it's just about people so thank you Hi Daniel, that was a very good presentation I'm from Brazil, I was not aware of GovCam, really liked it and now we're opening for questions so whoever wants to ask a question, please come to the microphone Hello, I'm from Mexico I just want to ask, why didn't you open public, the AK distribution for the front office and what are you using, if you are using something for the back office I mean which are your plans to implement digital government using al fresco, spoiler or what are your future plans for the sides? Thank you, we test open public and we we discovered the performance of the application wasn't just fine for us but it consumes a lot of resources so we decided to go on our own Drupal installation and try to use core modules and things that were standard in the industry on the second question we are using solar plus Lucene for our search try to index, PDFs and every database we have and the content manager is done with Drupal we are not using any other open source solutions Hi, I'm from Philadelphia I was just wondering what sort of testing tools you guys used for your site I assume that you would have some sort of automated testing for making sure that everything is up and running so we got several processes inside our government, we have our setup is development testing and releasing to production information security tests right now we are running Jmeter test that's the automation one where we try to scale and then we do some focus groups trying to set up a lot of analytics and metrics My name is John I'm from Nigeria we experienced the same problems that you just showed us I'm actually dreaming of the data we'll get where you are, we have lots of scattered websites all around it's exactly the same problem so I'm thinking, is there where you can put a little documentation for people in the .gov group at least we can download that and read through and then you can help us with the implementation Right now we have GitHub account which means in Spanish government of the city of Buenos Aires so we are trying to release all the code we are doing at our GitHub right now we are working we should polish our Drupal installation so you can deploy it we try to think it extremely open and focus on local governments but yes we are willing to help in anything we can Any more questions? Well perhaps I'll make one question about the .gov camp did only people from Buenos Aires attend this or did you have participation from other countries? It was an internal event we tried to get people involved and we were thinking about almost 100 people and they come about 500 which was really huge and scary Right now we are not thinking of organizing a lot of time for outside of our organization but it can always be a possibility It's a good idea I think Thank you Great job Daniel I love to see the Argentinian government people smiling that means you did a really good job Quick question on the technical architecture what role did Python play in that? We use Python for every services and external module we can use Python and Django to control extremely great all our APIs built in Python Okay So you built the APIs in Python I don't understand how Python plays with Drupal When you build a module Mariano is our lead developer he can't play it better but when you build our module for example forms you get your part and all the back end it runs in Python All the back end runs in Python For some modules Thank you How you doing? I got kind of two questions First I'm curious what drove the decision to kind of change the way you address the people Was it you responding to what the people were saying they wanted or was it a forward looking government saying this is what the future needs to be and then the second part of the question a little bit different as far as when you were planning out the project and trying to scope out the size of it and timeline how well did you do at staying within those boundaries? The first question will be it's a mix of Latin American countries I don't know how much you know about history but people many years they were kind of apart from governments when we draw our communication strategy for the major for the second term which is starting in 2011 we knew it was key for us to get closer to the people so mainly not also our only communication is focused in the cities and also our online and traditional communications focused on the citizens so it's a combination of people is not requesting it you need to be near people and the other part we tried to maintain inside our schedule using a concept which is called Lean Startup the minimal product you can release so you can move forward because what used to happen for Buenos Aires city websites had two previous failures they tried to do it all in one piece it was really hard so we took minimum by our product and tried to release things quick trying to get smarter thanks Daniel and if somebody wants to vote on this session you can do this on the DrupalCon website you can find the session and give a feedback for us thank you